Peace and Quiet

Beginning on Veteran’s Day this past Sunday, Broooklyn-based architecture firm Matter Practice and the Times Square Alliance in collaboration with the StoryCorp Military Voices Initiative is hosting a series of live conversations between veterans and civilians right in the heart of Times Square. The pavilion where these discussions take place—located at Duffy Square, between 46th and 47th Streets and Broadway—was designed by Sandra Wheeler and Alfred Zollinger and is composed of a simple kit-of-parts plywood and glass structure, with the program titled “Peace & Quiet” because it is intended to provide not only a place of healing and shelter for housing exchanges, but a dedicated site for bridging the divide between veterans who have loyally served our country and the civilians whose freedoms they protect. Visitors and passersby are welcome to drop in, leave a note, listen to the stories, and even shake hands with and personally thank the guest veterans on-site.

“Ever wonder what it was like to sleep in a hole in the Iraq desert? What the food was like in the mountains of Afghanistan?”—these are two of the questions posed on the site’s Facebook page, where you can also view candid process shots of the structure’s design and construction process, and see live daily feedback of the program.

Show your gratitude for the service of our nation’s veterans and be a part of the healing process by dropping by the Peace & Quiet pavilion this week. Conversations start on the hour daily and run through Friday, November 16th.

Photos of the Peace & Quiet Pavilion are by Ka-Man Tse.

Laurie Manfra is a freelance architecture and design journalist based on Long Island. She can be reached at morningglory1978@gmail.com.

Corrections where made to the photo credit and first paragraph on 11/16/2012.